Changing words in a text to links - am I doing this correctly?? (Newby to PHP)

Bigface

Hello everyone,

This is my first piece of php I have written, and after a few days of trail and error I came up with this code to replace certain words in an article for links.

I have searched for a ready made code for this but never found one so I tried to write one myself...

Since I am new to this I can hardly believe it seems to work.. But is there something I have overlooked?
For instance, would this still work if I have, lets say, a $wordlist array of a 1000 words, and an $article of 3000 words?

The following code makes the following text:

Hello, I am in a gReat place to say good morNiNg

into:

Hello, I am in a Great place to say good Morning


<?php
// ---------------------------------------------------------
//   GET FORM INFO
$article = "Hello, I am in a gReat place to say good morNiNg"

//----------------------------------------------------------     

//  LIST OF REGIONS AND THE LINKS THAT REPLACE THEM 

$wordlist = array(

0 => 'Hello',
1 => 'Great',
2 => 'Morning',

); 

$linklist = array(

0 => '<a href=hello.html>Hello</a>',
1 => '<a href=newyork.html>Great</a>',
2 => '<a href=morning.html>Morning</a>',

); 

//----------------------------------------------------------     

//  PUT THE LINK IN A NEW ARTICLE 

$newarticle = str_ireplace($wordlist, $linklist, $article);


// ---------------------------------------------------------
//   PRINT HTML 

print('<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">

<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1">
<title>Form Results</title>
</head>
<body>

<div align="center">
<table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">
<tr>
		');

print("
<td align=\"left\" valign=\"top\">
<b>Name of Region:</b>
</td>
<td align=\"left\" valign=\"top\">

$newarticle

</td>
</tr>
</table>
</body>
</html>
			");

?>

Thanks for all your help....

johanafm

Yes, it will work for "any size" of arrays. With the reservation of having too large arrays for the script to finish in its max execution time (set in php.ini or from within the script).

One thing you might want to deal with is word boundaries. For example, consider your arrays matched against the text "True Greatness", which will become "True Greatness"

And when outputting several lines of text, have a look at heredoc and nowdoc.

Bigface

Thanks johanafm for your reply!
I guess i better use nowdoc then, as $article actually will catch quite a large text posted from a form.

How do I prevent the problem you have given the example of ?? (greatness being linked..)

johanafm

The easiest is to use regular expressions. And do use Pearl Compatible Regular Expressions, not the deprecated POSIX.

	$words = array('great', 'morning');
	$links = array('<a href="http://great.com">Great</a>', '<a href="http://morning.com">Morning</a>');
	$text = "Good morning. I'm in a great place. Greatness is not part of the deal though, nor great-ness.";

/*	$words contain only the words, so a loop is used to construct the patterns.
	See below for how to do this without a loop and leave
	it to preg_replace to go through all array elements. */
for ($i = 0; $i < count($words); ++$i) {
	$text = preg_replace('#(?:\b)'.$words[$i].'([\s.,;?!])#i', $links[$i].'$1', $text);
}
echo $text . '<br/><br/>';

$patterns = array('#(?:\b)great(\b)#i', '#(?:\b)morning(\b)#i');
$text = "Good morning. I'm in a great place. Greatness is not part of the deal though, but great-ness is.";

/* Both $patterns and $links are arrays, so no need to loop over each.
$text = preg_replace($patterns, $links, $text);
echo $text;